Blondie, SSE Hydro, Glasgow
Five stars
IT’S been almost 20 years since Blondie’s comeback album. The accompanying tour brought them to Glasgow’s Barrowlands in November 1998 and delighted a generation of fans, me included, who had been too young to attend the famous Hogmanay show at the Apollo in 1979.
Debbie Harry was in her early 50s on that tour, but it was far from being a long-awaited swansong for the band’s career, cut short by Chris Stein’s illness in the early 1980s. In fact, it seems with every subsequent tour and album Blondie get stronger.
This tour, supporting Pollinator, easily their best album since 1980's Autoamerican shows a band comfortable with its place in current music. The rock solid greatest hits set interspersed with new material, with this year’s singles Fun and Long Time as welcome as Hanging on the Telephone, Call Me or Heart of Glass.
In pictures: Blondie are still atomic as Debbie Harry rocks Glasgow
Pollinator has been an effort to raise awareness about the dwindling bee population and what that could mean to our environment. So, the photographers awaiting their blonde goddess, must have sighed when she appeared in dark glasses, a hat featuring horns fashioned from two giant bees, and a black cape bearing the request Stop F*cking The Planet.
Once those had been discarded, the slightly detached performer of the past is now a woman communicating comfortably with the vast arena and singing as well as she did in her 30s – sometimes better. However, as a schoolgirl wearer of a prismatic badge that proclaimed, “Blondie is a Group” Chris Stein’s inscrutable presence is as vital. Clem Burke is confined behind see-through plastic sound baffles, lest his drumming burst any eardrums.
In pictures: Blondie are still atomic as Debbie Harry rocks Glasgow
If Debbie is on a mission to save the planet one hive at a time, she has certainly cemented her position as queen bee.
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